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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

"The Frugalware developer team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware Linux 1.6, our sixteenth stable release. No new features have been added since 1.6rc2, but 93 changes have been made to fix minor bugs. Here are the most important changes since 1.5: updated packages - Linux kernel 3.1.10, X.Org Server 1.11.2, GNOME 3.2, KDE 4.7, LibreOffice 3.4.5, Mozilla Firefox 10.0 to name a few major components; i686 and x86_64 ISO images are now hybrid and we no longer build separate USB images for these architectures; cpupower can be used to configure your CPU power management; UEFI/EFI support has been removed from i686; UUIDs are now used by the installer when generating the /etc/fstab for new installs....

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 4

Pros:

The main programs all work

Cons:

but a lot of thinsg still don't

The installer started by offering a choice of installer, installer (vga fb), and installer (gui). I chose the last, which eventually crashed, so I re-started with the second (I’m not sure what the first does). A beginner with no knowledge of partitioning would have trouble with the installer, but Frugalware does describe itself as being for ‘intermediate users’. It offers a choice of software packages, but doesn’t detail their contents. There are five desktops on offer: Xfce, KDE, Gnome, LXDE, and E17; I chose Xfce.

When I rebooted, I found a standard Xfce desktop. There’s not a lot of software listed for a 4.1GB disk (evidently those 5 desktops take up a lot of space) — LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Xchat, VLC, and Gimp — but they all worked perfectly, with no warnings when launched from the CLI. Media codecs are installed, and all my test files worked, even the buggy ‘mp4 from hell’. Later I discovered that the menu didn’t include all my software: as before Fontforge was installed but not listed.

When I tried to configure the panel, I found things coming back after being removed and there was even a panel crash. When I tried to run the gui package tool, it was missing a dependency. After I’d installed that from the CLI, I used it to install Gnucash. That was missing a dependency. Fontforge actually ran in this version, until it crashed with a segmentation fault. Frugalware is still not stable enough to recommend.

I've been using this distro for about a week now, and it is very nice. I have been so impressed, i've made Frugalware my main distro. The pacakage manager is pacman-g2. I have never used pacman at all, but am very impressed. It will automatically solve dependencies but will ignore them if requested. I appreciate this flexibility, which can't be achieved with apt/dpkg, which i used previously. I don't have many bad words to say about Frugalware. The installer has a few options and i chose the text mode, and it was buggy. It froze the first time and the second worked, but there is glitches that cause text to overlap selection boxes. Over all, a great distro and i'm suprised it doesn't have a larger user base.